Organizations can spend considerable time and effort identifying and hiring suitable employees. Good help is hard to find. Despite their best efforts, organizations still often meet with failure and simply accept high turnover and poor employee performance.
A variety of approaches to finding and hiring employees have been tried. A well-known tool for employee selection is the job application. Job applications help identify a job applicant's qualifications, such as educational background, job history, skills, and experience.
An employer typically collects a set of job applications from applicants who drop by an employer work site or appear at a job fair. Someone in the organization then reviews the applications to determine which applicants merit further investigation. Then, a job interview, a test, or some other review process is sometimes used to further limit the applicant pool.
With the advent of the electronic age, job applications can be completed electronically. In this way, the delays associated with processing paper can be minimized. However, even electronically-completed job applications can be of questionable merit and still require considerable effort on the part of the hiring organization to review them. A better way of selecting employees is still needed.